A DOG OF FLANDERS.

I

NELLO and Patrasche were left all alone in the world.

They were friends in a friendship closer than brotherhood.

Nello was a little Ardennois—Patrasche was a big Fleming. They were both of
the same age by length of years, yet one was still young, and the other was
already old. They had dwelt together almost all their days: both were
orphaned and destitute, and owed their lives to the same hand. It had been
the beginning of the tie between them, their first bond of sympathy; and it
bad strengthened day by day, and had grown with their growth, firm and
indissoluble, until they loved one another very greatly.

Their home was a little hut on the edge of a little village—a Flemish village
a league from Antwerp, set
page: 2 amidst flat
breadths of pasture and corn‐lands, with long lines of poplars and of alders
bending in the breeze on the edge of the great canal which ran through
it.

It had about a score of houses and homesteads, with shutters of bright green
or sky‐blue, and roofs rose‐red or black and white, and walls whitewashed
until they shone in the sun like snow. In the centre of the village stood a
windmill, placed on a little moss‐grown slope: it was a landmark to all the
level country round.

It had once been painted scarlet, sails and all, but that had been in its
infancy, half a century or more earlier, when it had ground wheat for the
soldiers of Napoleon; and it was now a ruddy brown, tanned by wind and
weather. It went queerly by fits and starts, as though rheumatic and stiff
in the joints from age, but it served the whole neighborhood, which would
have thought it almost as impious to carry grain elsewhere as to attend any
other religious service than the mass that was performed at the altar of the
little old gray church, with its conical steeple, which stood opposite to
it, and whose single bell rang morning, noon, and night with that strange,
subdued, hollow sadness which every bell that hangs in the Low Countries
seems to gain as an integral part of its melody.

page: 3

Within sound of the little melancholy clock almost from their birth upward,
they had dwelt together, Nello and Patrasche, in the little hut on the edge
of the village, with the cathedral spire of Antwerp rising in the
north‐east, beyond the great green plain of seeding grass and spreading corn
that stretched away from them like a tideless, changeless sea.

It was the hut of a very old man, of a very poor man—of old Jehan Daas, who
in his time had been a soldier, and who remembered the wars that had
trampled the country as oxen tread down the furrows, and who had brought
from his service nothing except a wound, which had made him a cripple.

When old Jehan Daas had reached his full eighty, his daughter had died in the
Ardennes, hard by Stavelot, and had left him in legacy her two‐year‐ old
son. The old man could ill contrive to support himself, but he took up the
additional burden uncomplainingly, and it soon became welcome and precious
to him. Little Nello—which was but a pet diminutive for Nicolas—throve with
him, and the old man and the little child lived in the poor little hut
contentedly.

It was a very humble little mud‐hut indeed, but it was clean and white as a
sea‐shell, and stood in a small plot of garden‐ground that yielded beans and
herbs and pumpkins.

page: 4

They were very poor, terribly poor—many a day they had nothing at all to eat.
They never by any chance had enough: to have had enough to eat would have
been to have reached paradise at once. But the old man was very gentle and
good to the boy, and the boy was a beautiful, innocent, truthful,
tender‐hearted creature; and they were happy on a crust and a few leaves of
cabbage, and asked no more of earth or heaven; save indeed that Patrasche
should be always with them, since without Patrasche where would they have
been?

For Patrasche was their alpha and omega; their treasury and granary; their
store of gold and wand of wealth; their bread‐winner and minister; their
only friend and comforter. Patrasche dead or gone from them, they must have
laid themselves down and died likewise. Patrasche was body, brains, hands,
head, and feet to both of them: Patrasche was their very life, their very
soul.

For Jehan Daas was old and a cripple, and Nello was but a child; and
Patrasche was their dog.

A dog of Flanders—yellow of hide, large of head and limb, with wolf‐like ears
that stood erect, and legs bowed and feet widened in the muscular
development wrought in his breed by many generations of hard service,
Patrasche came of a race which had toiled hard
page: 5 and cruelly from sire to son in Flanders many a century—slaves of slaves,
dogs of the people, beasts of the shafts and the harness, creatures that
lived straining their sinews in the gall of the cart, and died breaking
their hearts on the flints of the streets.

Patrasche had been born of parents who had labored hard all their days over
the sharp‐set stones of the various cities and the long, shadowless, weary
roads of the two Flanders and of Brabant. He had been born to no other
heritage than those of pain and of toil. He had been fed on curses and
baptized with blows. Why not? It was a Christian country, and Patrasche was
but a dog.

Before he was fully grown he had known the bitter gall of the cart and the
collar. Before he had entered his thirteenth month he had become the
property of a hardware‐dealer, who was accustomed to wander over the land
north and south, from the blue sea to the green mountains. They sold him for
a small price, because he was so young.

This man was a drunkard and a brute. The life of Patrasche was a life of
hell.

His purchaser was a sullen, ill‐living, brutal Brabantois, who heaped his
cart full with pots and pans and flagons and buckets, and other wares of
crockery
page: 6 and brass and tin, and left
Patrasche to draw the load as best he might, whilst he himself lounged idly
by the side in fat and sluggish ease, smoking his black pipe and stopping at
every wineshop or café on the road.

Happily for Patrasche—or unhappily—he was very strong: he came of an iron
race, long born and bred to such cruel travail; so that he did not die, but
managed to drag on a wretched existence under the brutal burdens, the
scarifying lashes, the hunger, the thirst, the blows, the curses, and the
exhaustion which are the only wages with which the Flemings repay the most
patient and laborious of all their fourfooted victims.

One day, after two years of this long and deadly agony, Patrasche was going
on as usual along one of the straight, dusty, unlovely roads that lead to
the city of Rubens.

It was full midsummer, and very warm. His cart was very heavy, piled high
with goods in metal and in earthenware. His owner sauntered on without
noticing him otherwise than by the crack of the whip as it curled round his
quivering loins.

The Brabantois had paused to drink beer himself at every wayside house, but
he had forbidden Patrasche to stop a moment for a draught from the canal.
Going
page: 7 along thus, in the full sun, on a
scorching highway, having eaten nothing for twenty‐four hours, and, which
was far worse to him, not having tasted water for near twelve, being blind
with dust, sore with blows, and stupefied with the merciless weight which
dragged upon his loins, Patrasche staggered and foamed a little at the
mouth, and fell.

He fell in the middle of the white, dusty road, in the full glare of the sun;
he was sick unto death, and motionless. His master gave him the only
medicine in his pharmacy—kicks and oaths and blows with a cudgel of oak,
which had been often the only food and drink, the only wage and reward, ever
offered to him.

But Patrasche was beyond the reach of any torture or of any curses. Patrasche
lay, dead to all appearances, down in the white powder of the summer
dust.

After a while, finding it useless to assail his ribs with punishment and his
ears with maledictions, the Brabantois—deeming life gone in him, or going so
nearly that his carcass was forever useless, unless indeed some one should
strip it of the skin for gloves—cursed him fiercely in farewell, struck off
the leathern bands of the harness, kicked his body aside into the grass,
and, groaning and muttering in
page: 8 savage wrath,
pushed the cart lazily along the road up hill, and left the dying dog for
the ants to sting and for the crows to pick.

It was the last day before Kermesse away at Louvain, and the Brabantois was
in haste to reach the fair, and get a good place for his truck of brass
wares.

He was in fierce wrath, because Patrasche had been a strong and much‐enduring
animal, and because he himself had now the hard task of pushing his charette
all the way to Louvain. But to stay to look after Patrasche never entered
his thoughts: the beast was dying and useless, and he would steal, to
replace him, the first large dog that he found wandering alone out of sight
of its master. Patrasche had cost him nothing, or next to nothing, and for
two long, cruel years had made him toil ceaselessly in his service from
sunrise to sunset, through summer and winter, in fair weather and foul.

He had got a fair use and a good profit out of Patrasche: being human, he was
wise, and left the dog to draw his last breath alone in the ditch, and have
his bloodshot eyes plucked out as they might be by the birds, whilst he
himself went on his way to beg and to steal, to eat and to drink, to dance
and to sing, in the mirth at Louvain. A dying dog, a dog of the
page: 9 cart ‐‐ why should he waste hours over its
agonies at peril of losing a handful of copper coins, at peril of a shout of
laughter.

Patrasche lay there, flung in the grass‐green ditch.

It was a busy road that day, and hundreds of people, on foot and on mules, in
wagons or in carts, went by, tramping quickly and joyously on to Louvain.
Some saw him, most did not even look: all passed on. A dead dog more or
less—it was nothing in Brabant: it would be nothing anywhere in the
world.

After a time, among the holiday‐makers, there came a little old man who was
bent and lame, and very feeble. He was in no guise for feasting: he was very
poorly and miserably clad, and he dragged his silent way slowly through the
dust among the pleasure‐seekers.

He looked at Patrasche, paused, wondered, turned aside, then kneeled down in
the rank grass and weeds of the ditch, and surveyed the dog with kindly eyes
of pity.

There was with him a little rosy, fair‐haired, dark‐eyed child of a few years
old, who pattered in amidst the bushes, that were for him breast‐high, and
stood gazing with a pretty seriousness upon the poor, great, quiet
beast.

page: 10

Thus it was that these two first met—the little Nello and the big
Patrasche.

The upshot of that day was, that old Jehan Daas, with much laborious effort,
drew the sufferer homeward to his own little hut, which was a stone’s throw
off amidst the fields, and there tended him with so much care that the
sickness, which had been a brain seizure, brought on by heat and thirst and
exhaustion, with time and shade and rest passed away, and health and
strength returned, and Patrasche staggered up again upon his four stout,
tawny legs.

Now for many weeks he had been useless, powerless, sore, near to death; but
all this time he had heard no rough word, had felt no harsh touch, but only
the pitying murmurs of the child’s voice and the soothing caress of the old
man’s hand.

In his sickness they too had grown to care for him, this lonely man and the
little happy child.

He had a corner of the hut, with a heap of dry grass for his bed; and they
had learned to listen eagerly for his breathing in the dark night, to tell
them that he lived; and when he first was well enough to essay a loud,
hollow, broken bay, they laughed aloud, and almost wept together for joy at
such a sign of his sure restoration; and little Nello, in delighted glee,
hung round his rugged neck with chains of
page: 11
marguerites, and kissed him with fresh and ruddy lips.

So then, when Patrasche arose, himself again, strong, big, gaunt, powerful,
his great wistful eyes had a gentle astonishment in them that there were no
curses to rouse him and no blows to drive him; and his heart awakened to a
mighty love, which never wavered once in its fidelity whilst life abode with
him.

But Patrasche, being a dog, was grateful. Patrasche lay pondering long with
grave, tender, musing brown eyes, watching the movements of his friends.

Now, the old soldier, Jehan Daas, could do nothing for his living but limp
about a little with a small cart, with which he carried daily the milk‐ cans
of those happier neighbors who owned cattle away into the town of
Antwerp.

The villagers gave him the employment a little out of charity—more because it
suited them well to send their milk into the town by so honest a carrier,
and bide at home themselves to look after their gardens, their cows, their
poultry, or their little fields. But it was becoming hard work for the old
man. He was eighty‐three, and Antwerp was a good league off, or more.

Patrasche watched the milk‐cans come and go that
page: 12 one day when he had got well and was lying in the
sun with the wreath of marguerites round his tawny neck.

The next morning, Patrasche, before the old man had touched the cart, arose
and walked to it and placed himself betwixt its handles, and testified, as
plainly as dumb show could do, his desire and his ability to work in return
for the bread of charity that he had eaten. Jehan Daas resisted long, for
the old man was one of those who thought it a foul shame to bind dogs to
labour for which Nature never formed them.

But Patrasche would not be gainsaid: finding they did not harness him, he
tried to draw the cart onward with his teeth.

At length Jehan Daas gave way, vanquished by the persistence and the
gratitude of this creature whom he had succoured. He fashioned his cart so
that Patrasche could run in it, and this he did every morning of his life
thenceforward.

When the winter came, Jehan Daas thanked the blessed fortune that had brought
him to the dying dog in the ditch that fair‐day of Louvain; for he was very
old, and he grew feebler with each year, and he would ill have known how to
pull his load of milk‐cans over the snows and through the deep ruts in the
mud if it
page: 13 had not been for the strength and
the industry of the animal he had befriended.

As for Patrasche, it seemed heaven to him.

After the frightful burdens that his old master had compelled him to strain
under, at the call of the whip at every step, it seemed nothing to him but
amusement to step out with this little light green cart, with its bright
brass cans, by the side of the gentle old man who always paid him with a
tender caress and with a kindly word. Besides, his work was over by three or
four in the day; and after that time he was free to do as he would—to
stretch himself, to sleep in the sun, to wander in the fields, to romp with
the young child, or to play with his fellow‐dogs. Patrasche was very
happy.

Fortunately for his peace, his former owner was killed in a drunken brawl at
the kermesse of Mechlin, and so sought not after him nor disturbed him in
his new and well‐loved home.

A few years later, old Jehan Daas, who had always been a cripple, became so
paralyzed with rheumatism that it was impossible for him to go out with the
cart any more.

Then little Nello, being now grown to his sixth year of age, and knowing the
town well from having accompanied his grandfather so many times, took his
place beside
page: 14 the cart, and sold the milk
and received the coins in exchange, and brought them back to their
respective owners with a pretty grace and seriousness which charmed all who
beheld him.

The little Ardennois was a beautiful child, with dark, grave, tender eyes,
and a lovely bloom upon his face, and fair locks that clustered to his
throat; and many an artist sketched the group as it went by him—the green
cart with the brass flagons of milk, and the great tawny‐coloured, massive
dog, with his belled harness that chimed cheerily as he went, and the small
figure that ran beside him, which had little white feet in great wooden
shoes, and a soft, grave, innocent, happy face like the little fair children
of Rubens.

Nello and Patrasche did the work so well and so joyfully together that Jehan
Daas himself, when the summer came and he was better again, had no need to
stir out, but could sit in the doorway in the sun and see them go forth
through the garden wicket, and then doze, and dream, and pray a little, and
then awake again as the clock tolled three and watch for their return. And
on their return Patrasche would shake himself free of his harness with a bay
of glee, and Nello would recount with pride the doings of the day; and they
would all go in together to their meal of rye bread and milk or soup, and
would see the shadows
page: 15 lengthen over the great plain, and see the
twilight veil the fair cathedral spire; and then lie down together to sleep
peacefully while the old man said a prayer.

So the days and the years went on, and the lives of Nello and Patrasche were
happy, innocent, and healthful.

II.

IN the spring and summer especially were they glad. Flanders is not
a lovely land, and around the burgh of Rubens it is perhaps least lovely of
all.

Corn and colza, pasture and plough, succeed each other on the characterless
plain in wearying repetition, and save by some gaunt gray tower, with its
peal of pathetic bells, or some figure coming athwart the fields, made
picturesque by a gleaner’s bundle or a woodman’s faggot, there is no change,
no variety, no beauty anywhere; and he who has dwelt upon the mountains or
amidst the forests feels oppressed as by imprisonment with the tedium and
the endlessness of that vast and dreary level.

But it is green and very fertile, and it has wide horizons that have a
certain charm of their own even
page: 16 in their
dulness and monotony; and among the rushes by the water‐side the flowers
grow, and the trees rise tall and fresh where the barges glide with their
great hulks black against the sun, and their little green barrels and
vari‐colored flags gay against the leaves.

Anyway, there is greenery and breadth of space enough to be as good as beauty
to a child and a dog; and these two asked no better, when their work was
done, than to lie buried in the lush grasses on the side of the canal, and
watch the cumbrous vessels drifting by, and bringing the crisp salt smell of
the sea among the blossoming scents of the country summer.

True, in the winter it was harder, and they had to rise in the darkness and
the bitter cold, and they had seldom as much as they could have eaten any
day, and the hut was scarce better than a shed when the nights were cold,
although it looked so pretty in warm weather, buried in a great
kindly‐clambering vine, that never bore fruit, indeed, but which covered it
with luxuriant green tracery all through the months of blossom and
harvest.

In winter the winds found many holes in the walls of the poor little hut, and
the vine was black and leafless, and the bare lands looked very bleak and
drear without, and sometimes within the floor was flooded and then frozen.
In winter it was hard, and the snow
page: 17 numbed
the little white limbs of Nello, and the icicles cut the brave, untiring
feet of Patrasche.

But even then they were never heard to lament, either of them. The child’s
wooden shoes and the dog’s four legs would trot manfully together over the
frozen fields to the chime of the bells on the harness; and then sometimes,
in the streets of Antwerp, some housewife would bring them a bowl of soup
and a handful of bread, or some kindly trader would throw some billets of
fuel into the little cart as it went homeward, or some woman in their own
village would bid them keep a share of the milk they carried for their own
food; and they would run over the white lands, through the early darkness,
bright and happy, and burst with a shout of joy into their home.

So, on the whole, it was well with them, very well; and Patrasche, meeting on
the highway or in the public streets the many dogs who toiled from daybreak
into nightfall, paid only with blows and curses, and loosened from the
shafts with a kick to starve and freeze as best they might—Patrasche in his
heart was very grateful to his fate, and thought it the fairest and the
kindliest the world could hold. Though he was often very hungry indeed when
he lay down at night; though he had to work in the heats of summer noons and
the rasping chills of winter dawns; though his
page: 18 feet were often tender with wounds from the sharp
edges of the jagged pavement; though he had to perform tasks beyond his
strength and against his nature—yet he was grateful and content: he did his
duty with each day, and the eyes that he loved smiled down on him. It was
sufficient for Patrasche.

There was only one thing which caused Patrasche any uneasiness in his life,
and it was this. Antwerp, as all the world knows, is full at every turn of
old piles of stones, dark and ancient, and majestic, standing in crooked
courts, jammed against gateways and taverns, rising by the water’s edge,
with bells ringing above them in the air, and ever and again out of their
arched doors a swell of music pealing.

There they remain, the grand old sanctuaries of the past, shut in amidst the
squalor, the hurry, the crowds, the unloveliness, and the commerce of the
modern world, and all day long the clouds drift and the birds circle and the
winds sigh around them, and beneath the earth at their feet there
sleeps—RUBENS.

And the greatness of the mighty Master still rests upon Antwerp, and wherever
we turn in its narrow streets his glory lies therein, so that all mean
things are thereby transfigured; and as we pace slowly through the winding
ways, and by the edge of the stagnant water, and through the noisome courts,
his spirit abides
page: 19 with us, and the heroic
beauty of his visions is about us, and the stones that once felt his
footsteps and bore his shadow seem to arise and speak of him with living
voices. For the city which is the tomb of Rubens still lives to us through
him, and him alone.

Without Rubens, what were Antwerp? A dirty, dusky, bustling mart, which no
man would ever care to look upon save the traders who do business on its
wharves. With Rubens, to the whole world of men it is a sacred name, a
sacred soil, a Bethlehem, where a god of Art saw light, a Golgotha, where a
god of Art lies dead.

It is so quiet there by that great white sepulchre—so quiet, save only when
the organ peals and, the choir cries aloud the Salve Regina or the Kyrie
Eleison. Sure no artist ever had a greater gravestone than that pure marble
sanctuary gives to him in the heart of his birth‐place in the chancel of St.
Jacques?

O nations! closely should you treasure your great men, for by them alone will
the future know of you. Flanders in her generations has been wise. In his
life she glorified this greatest of her sons, and in his death she magnifies
his name. But her wisdom is very rare.

Now, the trouble of Patrasche was this.

Into these great, sad piles of stones, that reared
page: 20 their melancholy majesty above the crowded roofs,
the child Nello would many and many a time enter, and disappear through
their dark arched portals, whilst Patrasche, left without upon the pavement,
would wearily and vainly ponder on what could be the charm which thus
allured from him his inseparable and beloved companion.

Once or twice he did essay to see for himself, clattering up the steps with
his milk‐cart behind him; but thereon he had been always sent back again
summarily by a tall custodian in black clothes and silver chains of office;
and fearful of bringing his little master into trouble, he desisted, and
remained couched patiently before the churches until such time as the boy
reappeared.

It was not the fact of his going into them which disturbed Patrasche: he knew
that people went to church: all the village went to the small, tumbledown,
gray pile opposite the red windmill. What troubled him was that little Nello
always looked strangely when he came out, always very flushed or very pale;
and whenever he returned home after such visitations would sit silent and
dreaming, not caring to play, but gazing out at the evening skies beyond the
line of the canal, very subdued and almost sad.

What was it? wondered Patrasche.

page: 21

He thought it could not be good or natural for the little lad to be so grave,
and in his dumb fashion he tried all he could to keep Nello by him in the
sunny fields or in the busy market‐place.

But to the churches Nello would not go: most often of all would he
go to the great cathedral; and Patrasche, left without on the stones by the
iron fragments of Quentin Matsys’s gate, would stretch himself and yawn and
sigh, and even howl now and then, all in vain, until the doors closed and
the child perforce came forth again, and winding his arms about the dog’s
neck would kiss him on his broad, tawney‐colored forehead, and murmur always
the same words:

“If I could only see them, Patrasche!—if I could only see them!”

What were they? pondered Patrasche, looking up with large, wistful,
sympathetic eyes.

One day, when the custodian was out of the way and the doors left ajar, he
got in for a moment after his little friend and saw. “They” were two great
covered pictures on either side of the choir.

Nello was kneeling, wrapt as in an ecstasy, before the altar‐picture of the
Assumption, and when he noticed Patrasche, and rose and drew the dog gently
out into the air, his face was wet with tears, and he
page: 22 looked up at the veiled places as he passed them,
and murmured to his companion, “It is so terrible not to see them,
Patrasche, just because one is poor and cannot pay! He never meant that the
poor should not see them when he painted them, I am sure. He would have had
us see them any day,—every day: that I am sure. And they keep them shrouded
there—shrouded in the dark, the beautiful things!—and they never feel the
light, and no eyes look on them, unless rich people come and pay. If I could
only see them, I would be content to die.”

But he could not see them, and Patrasche could not help him, for to gain the
silver piece that the church exacts as the price for looking on the glories
of the “Elevation of the Cross” and the “Descent of the Cross” was a thing
as utterly beyond the powers of either of them as it would have been to
scale the heights of the cathedral‐spire.

They had never so much as a sou to spare: if they cleared enough to get a
little wood for the stove, a little broth for the pot, it was the utmost
they could do. And yet the heart of the child was set in sore and endless
longing upon beholding the greatness of the two veiled Rubens.

The whole soul of the little Ardennois thrilled and stirred with an absorbing
passion for art.

page: 23

Going on his ways through the old city in the early days before the sun or
the people had seen them, Nello, who looked only a little peasant‐boy, with
a great dog drawing milk to sell from door to door, was in a heaven of
dreams whereof Rubens was the god. Nello, cold and hungry, with stockingless
feet in wooden shoes, and the winter winds blowing among his curls and
lifting his poor thin garments, was in a rapture of meditation, wherein all
that he saw was the beautiful fair face of the Mary of “The Assumption,”
with the waves of her golden hair lying upon her shoulders, and the light of
an eternal sun shining down upon her brow. Nello, reared in poverty, and
buffeted by fortune, and untaught in letters, and unheeded by men, had the
compensation or the curse which is called Genius.

No one knew it. He as little as any. No one knew it.

Only indeed Patrasche, who, being with him always, saw him draw with chalk
upon the stones any and every thing that grew or breathed,—heard him on his
little bed of hay murmur all manner of timid, pathetic prayers to the spirit
of the great Master; watched his gaze darken and his face radiate at the
evening glow of sunset or the rosy rising of the dawn; and felt many and
many a time the tears of a strange, name‐
page: 24
less pain and joy, mingled together, fall hotly from the bright young eyes
upon his own wrinkled yellow forehead.

“I should go to my grave quite content if I thought, Nello, that when thou
growest a man thou could’st own this hut and the little plot of ground, and
labour for thyself, and be called Baas by thy neighbours,” said the old man
Jehan many an hour from his bed.

For to own a bit of soil, and to be called Baas—master—by the hamlet round,
is to have achieved the highest ideal of a Flemish peasant; and the old
soldier, who had wandered over all the earth in his youth, and had brought
nothing back, deemed in his old age that to live and die on one spot in
contented humility was the fairest fate he could desire for his darling.

But Nello said nothing.

The same leaven was working in him that in other times begat Rubens, and
Jordaens, and the Van Eycks, and all their wondrous tribe, and in times more
recent begat—in the green country of the Ardennes, where the Meuse washes
the old walls of Dijon—the great artist of the Patroclus, whose genius is
too near us for us aright to measure its divinity.

Nello dreamed of other things in the future than of tilling the little rood
of earth, and living under the
page: 25 wattle roof,
and being called Baas by neighbours a little poorer or a little less poor
than himself. The cathedral spire, where it rose beyond the fields in the
ruddy evening skies or in the dim, gray, misty mornings, said other things
to him than this. But these he told only to Patrasche, whispering,
childlike, his fancies in the dog’s ear when they went together at their
work through the fogs of the daybreak, or lay together at their rest among
the rustling rushes by the water’s side.

For such dreams are not easily shaped into speech to awake the slow
sympathies of human auditors; and they would only have sorely perplexed and
troubled the poor old man bedridden in his corner, who, for his part,
whenever he had trod the streets of Antwerp, had thought the daub of blue
and red that they called a Madonna, on the walls of the wine‐shop where he
drank his sou’s worth of black beer, quite as good as any of the famous
altar‐pieces for which the stranger‐folk traveled far and wide into Flanders
from every land on which the good sun shone.

There was only one other beside Patrasche to whom Nello could talk at all of
his daring fantasies. This other was little Alois, who lived at the old red
mill on the grassy mound, and whose father, the miller, was the best‐to‐do
husbandman in all the village.

Little Alois was only a pretty baby with soft round,
page: 26 rosy features, made lovely by those sweet dark
eyes that the Spanish rule has left in so many a Flemish face, in testimony
of the Alvan dominion, as Spanish art has left broadsown throughout the
country, majestic palaces and stately courts, gilded house‐fronts and
sculptured lintels—histories in blazonry and poems in stone.

Little Alois was often with Nello and Patrasche. They played in the fields,
they ran in the snow, they gathered the daisies and bilberries, they went up
to the old gray church together, and they often sat together by the broad
wood‐fire in the mill‐house.

Little Alois, indeed, was the, richest child in the hamlet. She had neither
brother nor sister; her blue serge dress had never a hole in it; at kermesse
she had as many gilded nuts and Agni Dei in sugar as her hands could hold;
and when she went up for her first communion, her flaxen curls were covered
with a cap of richest Mechlin lace, which had been her mother’s and her
grandmother’s before it came to her. Men spoke already, though she had but
twelve years, of the good wife she would be for their sons to woo and win;
but she herself was a little, gay, simple child, in nowise conscious of her
heritage, and she loved no playfellows so well as Jehan Daas’ grandson, and
his dog.

One day her father, Baas Cogez, a good man, but
page: 27 somewhat stern, came on a pretty group in the
long meadow behind the mill, where the aftermath had that day been cut.

It was his little daughter sitting amidst the hay, with the great tawny head
of Patrasche on her lap, and many wreaths of poppies and blue cornflowers
round them both: on a clean smooth slab of pine wood the boy Nello drew
their likeness with a stick of charcoal.

The miller stood and looked at the portrait with tears in his eyes, it was so
strangely like, and he loved his only child closely and well. Then he
roughly chid the little girl for idling there whilst her mother needed her
within, and sent her indoors crying and afraid: then, turning, he snatched
the wood from Nello’s hands.

“Dost do much of such folly?” he asked, but there was a tremble in his
voice.

Nello coloured and hung his head. “I draw everything I see,” he murmured.

The miller was silent: then he stretched his hand out with a franc in it.

“It is folly, as I say, and evil waste of time: nevertheless, it is like
Alois, and will please the house‐mother. Take this silver bit for it, and
leave it for me.”

The colour died out of the face of the young Arden‐
page: 28 nois; he lifted his head and put his hands behind
his back.

“Keep your money and the portrait both, Baas Cogez,” he said, simply. “You
have been often good to me.”

Then he called Patrasche to him, and walked away across the fields.

“I could have seen them with that franc,” he murmured to
Patrasche, “but I could not sell her picture—not even for them.”

Baas Cogez went into his mill‐house sore troubled in his mind.

“That lad must not be so much with Alois,” he said to his wife that night.
“Trouble may come of it hereafter: he is fifteen now, and she is twelve; and
the boy is comely of face and form.”

“And he is a good lad and a loyal,” said the housewife, feasting her eyes on
the piece of pine wood where it was throned above the chimney with a cuckoo
clock in oak and a Calvary in wax.

“Yea, I do not gainsay that,” said the miller, draining his pewter
flagon.

“Then, if what you think of were ever to come to pass,” said the wife,
hesitatingly, “would it matter so much? She will have enough for both, and
one cannot be better than happy.”

page: 29

“You are a woman, and therefore a fool,” said the miller, harshly, striking
his pipe on the table. “The lad is nought but a beggar, and, with these
painter’s fancies, worse than a beggar. Have a care that they are not
together in the future, or I will send the child to the surer keeping of the
nuns of the Sacred Heart.”

The poor mother was terrified, and promised humbly to do his will. Not that
she could bring herself altogether to separate the child from her favorite
playmate, nor did the miller even desire that extreme of cruelty to a young
lad who was guilty of nothing except poverty. But there were many ways in
which little Alois was kept away from her chosen companion; and Nello, being
a boy, proud and quiet and sensitive, was quickly wounded, and ceased to
turn his own steps and those of Patrasche, as he had been used to do with
every moment of leisure, to the old red mill upon the slope.

What his offence was he did not know: he supposed he had in some manner
angered Baas Cogez by taking the portrait of Alois in the meadow; and when
the child who loved him would run to him and nestle her hand in his, he
would smile at her very sadly and say with a tender concern for her before
himself,—

“Nay, Alois, do not anger your father. He thinks
page: 30 that I make you idle, dear, and he is not pleased
that you should be with me. He is a good man and loves you well: we will not
anger him, Alois.”

But it was with a sad heart that he said it, and the earth did not look so
bright to him as it had used to do when he went out at sunrise under the
poplars down the straight roads with Patrasche.

The old red mill had been a landmark to him, and he had been used to pause by
it, going and coming, for a cheery greeting with its people as her little
flaxen head rose above the low mill‐wicket, and her little rosy hands had
held out a bone or a crust to Patrasche.

Now the dog looked wistfully at a closed door, and the boy went on without
pausing, with a pang at his heart, and the child sat within with tears
dropping slowly on the knitting to which she was set on her little stool by
the stove; and Baas Cogez, working among his sacks and his mill‐gear, would
harden his will, and say to himself, “It is best so. The lad is all but a
beggar, and full of idle, dreaming fooleries. Who knows what mischief might
not come of it in the future?”

So he was wise in his generation, and would not have the door unbarred,
except upon rare and formal occasions, which seemed to have neither warmth
nor
page: 31 mirth in them to the two children,
who had been accustomed so long to a daily, gleeful, careless, happy
interchange of greeting, speech, and pastime, with no other watcher of their
sports or auditor of their fancies than Patrasche, sagely shaking the brazen
bells of his collar and responding with all a dog’s swift sympathies to
their every change of mood.

All this while the little panel of pine wood remained over the chimney in the
mill‐kitchen with the cuckoo clock and the waxen Calvary, and sometimes it
seemed to Nello a little hard that whilst his gift was accepted he himself
should be denied.

But he did not complain: it was his habit to be quiet: old Jehan Daas had
said ever to him, “We are poor: we must take what God sends—the ill with the
good: the poor cannot choose.”

To which the boy had always listened in silence, being reverent of his old
grandfather; but nevertheless a certain vague, sweet hope, such as beguiles
the children of genius, had whispered in his heart, “Yet the poor do choose
sometimes—choose to be great, so that men cannot say them nay.”

And he thought so still in his innocence; and one day, when the little Alois,
finding him by chance alone among the corn‐fields by the canal, ran to him
and held him close, and sobbed piteously because the mor‐
page: 32 row would be her saint’s day;,and for the first
time in all her life her parents had failed to bid him to the little supper
and romp in the great barns with which her feast‐day was always celebrated,
Nello had kissed her and murmured to her in firm faith,—

“It shall be different one day, Alois. One day that little bit of pine wood
that your father has of mine shall be worth its weight in silver; and he
will not shut the door against me then. Only love me always, dear little
Alois; only love me always, and I will be great.”

“And if I do not love you?” the pretty child asked, pouting a little through
her tears, and moved by the instinctive coquetries of her sex.

Nello’s eyes left her face and wandered to the distance, where in the
red‐and‐gold of the Flemish night the cathedral spire rose.

There was a smile on his face so sweet and yet so sad that little Alois was
awed by it.

“I will be great still,” he said under his breath—“great still, or die,
Alois.”

“You do not love me then!” said the little spoilt child, pushing him away;
but the boy shook his head and smiled, and went on his way through the tall
yellow corn, seeing as in a vision some day in a fair future when he should
come into that old familiar land and
page: 33 ask
Alois of her people, and be not refused or denied, but received in honor,
whilst the village folk should throng to look upon him and say in one
another’s ears, “Dost see him? He is a king among men, for he is a great
artist and the world speaks his name; and yet he was only our poor little
Nello, who was a beggar, as one may say, and only got his bread by the help
of his dog.”

And he thought how he would fold his grandsire in furs and purples, and
pourtray him as the old man is pourtrayed in the Family in the chapel of St.
Jacques; and of how he would hang the throat of Patrasche with a collar of
gold, and place him on his right hand, and say to the people, “This was once
my only friend;” and of how he would build himself a great white marble
palace, and make to himself luxuriant gardens of pleasure, on the slope
looking outward to where the cathedral spire rose, and not dwell in it
himself; but summon to it, as to a home, all men young and poor and
friendless, but of the will to do mighty things; and of how he would say to
them always, if they sought to bless his name, “Nay, do not thank me—thank
Rubens. Without him, what should I have been?”

And these dreams, beautiful, impossible, innocent, free of all selfishness,
full of heroical worship, were so
page: 34 closely
about him as he went that he was happy—happy even on this sad anniversary of
Alois’ saint’s day, when he and Patrasche went home by themselves to the
little dark hut and the meal of black bread, whilst in the mill‐house all
the children of the village sang and laughed, and ate the big round cakes of
Dijon and the almond gingerbread of Brabant, and danced in the great barn to
the light of the stars and the music of flute and fiddle.

“Never mind, Patrasche,” he said, with his arms round the dog’s neck, as they
both sat in the door of the hut, where the sounds of the mirth at the mill
came down to them on the night air—“never mind. It shall all be changed by
and by.”

He believed in the future: Patrasche, of more experience and of more
philosophy, thought that the loss of the mill supper in the present was ill
compensated by dreams of milk and honey in some vague hereafter.

And Patrasche growled whenever he passed by Baas Cogez.

page: 35

“THIS is Alois’s name‐day, is it not?” said the old man Daas that
night from the corner where he was stretched upon his bed of sacking.

The boy gave a gesture of assent: he wished that the old man’s memory had
erred a little, instead of keeping such exact account.

“And why not there?” his grandfather pursued. “Thou hast never missed a year
before, Nello.”

“Thou art too sick to leave,” murmured the lad, bending his handsome young
head over the bed.

“Tut! tut! Mother Vulette would have come and sat with me, as she does scores
of times. What is the cause, Nello?” the old man persisted. “Thou surely
hast not had ill words with the little one?”

“Nay; grandfather—never,” said the boy quickly, with a hot colour in his bent
face. “Simply and truly, Baas Cogez did not have me asked this year. He has
taken some whim against me.”

“But thou hast done nothing wrong?”

“That I know—nothing. I took the portrait of Alois on a piece of pine: that
is all.”

“Ah!”

page: 36

The old man was silent: the truth suggested itself to him with the boy’s
innocent answer. He was tied to a bed of dried leaves in the corner of a
wattle hut, but he had not wholly forgotten what the ways of the world were
like.

He drew Nello’s fair head fondly to his breast with a tenderer gesture.

“Thou art very poor, my child,” he said with a quiver the more in his aged,
trembling voice—“so poor! It is very hard for thee.”

“Nay, I am rich,” murmured Nello; and in his innocence he thought so—rich
with the imperishable powers that are mightier than the might of kings. And
he went and stood by the door of the hut in the quiet autumn night, and
watched the stars troop by and the tall poplars bend and shiver in the
wind.

All the casements of the mill‐house were lighted, and every now and then the
notes of the flute came to him. The tears fell down his cheeks, for he was
but a child, yet he smiled, for he said to himself, “In the future!”

He stayed there until all was quite still and dark, then he and Patrasche
went within and slept together, long and deeply, side by side.

Now he had a secret which only Patrasche knew.
page: 37 There was a little out‐ house to the hut, which no one entered but
himself—a dreary place, but with abundant clear light from the north. Here
he had fashioned himself rudely an easel in rough lumber, and here on a
great gray sea of stretched paper he had given shape to one of the
innumerable fancies which possessed his brain.

No one had ever taught him anything; colours he had no means to buy; he had
gone without bread many a time to procure even the few rude vehicles that he
had here; and it was only in black or white that he could fashion the things
he saw. This great figure which he had drawn here in chalk was only an old
man sitting on a fallen tree—only that. He had seen old Michel the woodman
sitting so at evening many a time.

He had never had a soul to tell him of outline or perspective, of anatomy or
of shadow, and yet he had given all the weary, worn‐out age, all the sad,
quiet patience, all the rugged, careworn pathos of his original, and given
them so that the old lonely figure was a poem, sitting there, meditative and
alone, on the dead tree, with the darkness of the descending night behind
him.

It was rude, of course, in a way, and had many faults, no doubt; and yet it
was real, true in Nature
page: 38 true in art, and
very mournful, and in a manner beautiful.

Patrasche had lain quiet countless hours watching its gradual creation after
the labour of each day was done, and he knew that Nello had a hope—vain and
wild perhaps, but strongly cherished—of sending this great drawing to
compete for a prize of two hundred francs a year which it was announced in
Antwerp would be open to every lad of talent, scholar or peasant, under
eighteen, who would attempt to win it with some unaided work of chalk or
pencil. Three of the foremost artists in the town of Rubens were to be the
judges and elect the victor according to his merits.

All the spring and summer and autumn Nello had been at work upon this
treasure, which, if triumphant, would build him his first step toward
independence and the mysteries of the art which he blindly, ignorantly, and
yet passionately adored.

He said nothing to any one: his grandfather would not have understood, and
little Alois was lost to him. Only to Patrasche he told all, and whispered,
“Rubens would give it me, I think, if he knew.”

Patrasche thought so too, for he knew that Rubens had loved dogs or he had
never painted them with such exquisite fidelity; and men who loved dogs
were, as Patrasche knew, always pitiful.

page: 39

The drawings were to go in on the first day of December, and the decision be
given on the twenty‐fourth, so that he who should win might rejoice with all
his people at the Christmas season.

In the twilight of a bitter wintry day, and with a beating heart, now quick
with hope, now faint with fear, Nello placed the great picture on his little
green milk‐cart, and took it, with the help of Patrasche, into the town, and
there left it, as enjoined, at the doors of a public building.

“Perhaps it is worth nothing at all. How can I tell?” he thought, with the
heart‐sickness of a great timidity.

Now that he had left it there, it seemed to him so hazardous, so vain, so
foolish, to dream that he, a little lad with bare feet, who barely knew his
letters, could do anything at which great painters, real artists, could ever
deign to look.

Yet he took heart as he went by the cathedral: the lordly form of Rubens
seemed to rise from the fog and the darkness, and to loom in its
magnificence before him, whilst the lips, with their kindly smile, seemed to
him to murmur, “Nay, have courage! It was not by a weak heart and by faint
fears that I wrote my name for all time upon Antwerp.”

Nello ran home through the cold night, comforted.
page: 40 He had done his best: the rest must be as God
willed, he thought, in that innocent, unquestioning faith which had been
taught him in the little gray chapel among the willows and the
poplar‐trees.

The winter was very sharp already. That night, after they reached the hut,
snow fell; and fell for very many days after that, so that the paths and the
divisions in the fields were all obliterated, and all the smaller streams
were frozen over, and the cold was intense upon the plains. Then, indeed, it
became hard work to go round for the milk, while the world was all dark, and
carry it through the darkness to the silent town.

Hard work, especially for Patrasche, for the passage of the years, that were
only bringing Nello a stronger youth, were bringing him old age, and his
joints were stiff, and his bones ached often. But he would never give up his
share of the labour. Nello would fain have spared him, and drawn the cart
himself, but Patrasche would not allow it. All he would ever permit or
accept was the help of a thrust from behind to the truck as it lumbered
along through the ice‐ruts. Patrasche had lived in harness, and he was proud
of it. He suffered a great deal sometimes from frost, and the terrible
roads, and the rheumatic pains of his limbs, but he only drew his breath
hard and bent
page: 41 his stout neck, and trod
onward with steady patience.

“Rest thee at home, Patrasche—it is time thou didst rest—and I can quite well
push in the cart by myself,” urged Nello many a morning; but Patrasche, who
understood him aright, would no more have consented to stay at home than a
veteran soldier to shirk when the charge was sounding; and every day he
would rise and place himself in his shafts, and plod along over the snow
through the fields that his four round feet had left their print upon so
many, many years.

“One must never rest till one dies,” thought Patrasche; and sometimes it
seemed to him that that time of rest for him was not very far off. His sight
was less clear than it had been, and it gave him pain to rise after the
night’s sleep, though he would never lie a moment in his straw when once the
bell of the chapel tolling five, let him know that the daybreak of labour
had begun.

“My poor Patrasche, we shall soon lie quiet together, you and I,” said old
Jehan Daas, stretching out to stroke the head of Patrasche with the old
withered hand which had always shared with him its one poor crust of bread;
and the hearts of the old man and the old dog ached together with one
page: 42 thought: When they were gone, who would
care for their darling ?

One afternoon, as they came back from Antwerp, over the snow, which had
become hard and smooth as marble over all the Flemish plains, they found
dropped in the road a pretty little puppet—a tambourine‐player, all scarlet
and gold, about six inches high, and, unlike greater personages when Fortune
lets them drop, quite unspoiled and unhurt by its fall. It was a pretty toy.
Nello tried to find its owner, and, failing, thought that it was just the
thing to please Alois.

It was quite night when he passed the mill‐house: he knew the little window
of her room. It could be no harm, he thought, if he gave her his little
piece of treasure‐trove, they had been play‐fellows so long.

There was a shed with a sloping roof beneath her casement: he climbed it and
tapped softly at the lattice: there was a little light within.

The child opened it and looked out half frightened.

Nello put the tambourine‐player into her hands.

“Here is a doll I found in the snow, Alois. Take it,” he whispered—“take it,
and God bless thee, dear!”

He slid down from the shed‐roof before she had time to thank him, and ran off
through the darkness.

page: 43

That night there was a fire at the mill. Out‐buildings and much corn were
destroyed, although the mill itself and the dwelling‐house were unharmed.
All the village was out in terror, and engines came tearing through the snow
from Antwerp. The miller was insured, and would lose nothing: nevertheless,
he was in furious wrath, and declared aloud that the fire was due to no
accident, but to some foul intent.

Nello, awakened from his sleep, ran to help with the rest: Baas Cogez thrust
him angrily aside.

“Thou wert loitering here after dark,” he said roughly. “I believe, on my
soul, that thou dost know more of the fire than any one.”

Nello heard him in silence, stupefied, not supposing that any one could say
such things except in jest, and not comprehending how any one could pass a
jest at such a time.

Nevertheless, the miller said the brutal thing openly to many of his
neighbours in the day that followed; and though no serious charge was ever
preferred against the lad, it got bruited about that Nello had been seen in
the mill‐yard after dark on some unspoken errand, and that he bore Baas
Cogez a grudge for forbidding his intercourse with little Alois; and so the
hamlet, which followed the sayings of its richest landowner servilely, and
whose families all hoped to
page: 44 secure the
riches of Alois in some future time for their sons, took the hint to give
grave looks and cold words to old Jehan Daas’s grandson.

No one said anything to him openly, but all the village agreed together to
humour the miller’s prejudice, and at the cottages and farms where Nello and
Patrasche called every morning for the milk for Antwerp, downcast glances
and brief phrases replaced to them the broad smiles and cheerful greetings
to which they had been always used. No one really credited the miller’s
absurd suspicion, nor the outrageous accusations born of them, but the
people were all very poor and very ignorant, and the one rich man of the
place had pronounced against him. Nello, in his innocence and his
friendlessness, had no strength to stem the popular tide.

“Thou art very cruel to the lad,” the miller’s wife dared to say, weeping, to
her lord. “Sure he is an innocent lad and a faithful, and would never dream
of any such wickedness, however sore his heart might be.”

But Baas Cogez being an obstinate man, having once said a thing, held to it
doggedly, though in his innermost soul he knew well the injustice that he
was committing.

Meanwhile, Nello endured the injury done against him with a certain proud
patience that disdained to
page: 45 complain: he
only gave way a little when he was quite alone with old Patrasche. Besides,
he thought, “If my picture should win! They will be sorry then,
perhaps.”

Still, to a boy not quite sixteen, and who had dwelt in one little world all
his short life, and in his childhood had been caressed and applauded on all
sides, it was a hard trial to have the whole of that little world turn
against him for naught. Especially hard in that bleak, snow‐bound,
famine‐stricken winter‐time, when the only light and warmth there could be
found abode beside the village hearths and in the kindly greetings of
neighbours. In the winter‐time all drew nearer to each other, all to all,
except to Nello and Patrasche, with whom none now would have anything to do,
and who were left to fare as they might with the old paralysed, bedridden
man in the little cabin, whose fire was often low, and whose board was often
without bread, for there was a buyer from Antwerp who had taken to drive his
mule in of a day for the milk of the various dairies, and there were only
three or four of the people who had refused his terms of purchase and
remained faithful to the little green cart. So that the burden which
Patrasche drew had become very light, and the centime‐pieces in Nello’s
pouch had become, alas! very small likewise.

page: 46

The dog would stop, as usual, at all the familiar gates, which were now
closed to him, and look up at them with wistful, mute appeal; and it cost
the neighbours a pang to shut their doors and their hearts, and let
Patrasche draw his cart on again, empty. Nevertheless, they did it, for they
desired to please Baas Cogez.

Noël was close at hand.

The weather was very wild and cold. The snow was six feet deep, and the ice
was firm enough to bear oxen and men upon it everywhere. At this season the
little village was always gay and cheerful. At the poorest dwelling there
were possets and cakes, joking and dancing, sugared saints and gilded Jésus.
The merry Flemish bells jingled everywhere on the horses; everywhere within
doors some well‐filled soup‐pot sang and smoked over the stove; and
everywhere over the snow without laughing maidens pattered in bright
kerchiefs and stout kirtles, going to and from the mass. Only in the little
hut it was very dark and very cold.

Nello and Patrasche were left utterly alone, for one night in the week before
the Christmas Day, Death entered there, and took away from life forever old
Jehan Daas, who had never known life aught save its poverty and its pains.
He had long been half dead,
page: 47 incapable of
any movement except a feeble gesture, and powerless for anything beyond a
gentle word; and yet his loss fell on them both with a great horror in it:
they mourned him passionately. He had passed away from them in his sleep,
and when in the gray dawn they learned their bereavement, unutterable
solitude and desolation seemed to close around them. He had long been only a
poor, feeble, paralyzed old man, who could not raise a hand in their
defence, but he had loved them well: his smile had always welcomed their
return. They mourned for him unceasingly, refusing to be comforted, as in
the white winter day they followed the deal shell that held his body to the
nameless grave by the little gray church. They were his only mourners, these
two whom he had left friendless upon earth—the young boy and the old
dog.

“Surely, he will relent now and let the poor lad come hither?” thought the
miller’s wife, glancing at her husband where he smoked by the hearth.

Baas Cogez knew her thought, but he hardened his heart, and would not unbar
his door as the little, humble funeral went by. “The boy is a beggar,” he
said to himself: “he shall not be about Alois.”

The woman dared not say anything aloud, but when the grave was closed and the
mourners had gone, she put a wreath of immortelles into Alois’ hands and
bade
page: 48 her go and lay it reverently on
the dark, unmarked mound where the snow was displaced.

Nello and Patrasche went home with broken hearts. But even of that poor,
melancholy, cheerless home they were denied the consolation. There was a
month’s rent over‐due for their little place, and when Nello had paid the
last sad service to the dead he had not a coin left. He went and begged
grace of the owner of the hut, a cobbler who went every Sunday night to
drink his pint of wine and smoke with Baas Cogez. The cobbler would grant no
mercy. He was a harsh, miserly man, and loved money. He claimed in default
of his rent every stick and stone, every pot and pan, in the hut, and bade
Nello and Patrasche be out of it on the morrow.

Now, the cabin was lowly enough, and in some sense miserable enough, and yet
their hearts clove to it with a great affection. They had been so happy
there, and in the summer, with its clambering vine and its flowering beans,
it was so pretty and bright in the midst of the sun‐lighted fields! There
life in it had been full of labour and privation, and yet they had been so
well content, so gay of heart, running together to meet the old man’s
never‐failing smile of welcome!

All night long the boy and the dog sat by the fireless hearth in the
darkness, drawn close to‐
page: 49 gether for warmth
and sorrow. Their bodies were insensible to the cold, but their hearts
seemed frozen in them.

When the morning broke over the white chill earth it was the morning of
Christmas Eve. With a shudder, Nello clasped close to him his only friend,
while his tears fell hot and fast on the dog’s frank forehead. “Let us go,
Patrasche—dear, dear Patrasche,” he murmured. “We will not wait to be kicked
out: let us go.”

Patrasche had no will but his, and they went sadly, side by side, out from
the little place which was so dear to them, and in which every humble,
homely thing was to them precious and beloved. Patrasche drooped his head
wearily as he passed by his own green cart: it was no longer his—it had to
go with the rest in the dues of debt, and his brass harness lay idle and
glittering on the snow. The dog could have lain down beside it and died for
very heart‐sickness as he went, but whilst the lad lived and needed him
Patrasche would not yield and give way.

They took the old accustomed road into Antwerp. The day had yet scarce more
than dawned, most of the shutters were still closed, but some of the
villagers were about. They took no notice whilst the dog and the boy passed
by them. At one door Nello paused and
page: 50
looked wistfully within: his grandfather had done many a kindly turn in
neighbour’s service to the people who dwelt there.

“Would you give Patrasche a crust?” he said, timidly. “He is old, and he has
had nothing since last forenoon.”

The woman shut the door hastily, murmuring some vague saying that wheat and
rye were very dear that season. The boy and the dog went on again wearily:
they asked no more.

By slow and painful ways they reached Antwerp as the chimes tolled ten.

“If I had anything about me I could sell to get him bread!” thought Nello,
but he had nothing except the wisp of linen and serge that covered him, and
his pair of wooden shoes.

Patrasche understood, and nestled his nose into the lad’s hand, as though to
pray him not to be disquieted for any woe or want of his.

The winner of the drawing prize was to be proclaimed at noon, and to the
public building where he had left his treasure Nello made his way. On the
steps and in the entrance‐hall there was a crowd of youths—some of his age,
some older, all with parents or relatives or friends. His heart was sick
with fear as he went among them, holding Patrasche close to him. The great
bells of the city clashed out the hour
page: 51 of
noon with brazen clamor. The doors of the inner hall were opened; the eager,
panting throng rushed in: it was known that the selected picture would be
raised above the rest upon a wooden dais.

A mist obscured Nello’s sight, his head swam, his limbs almost failed him.
When his vision cleared he saw the drawing raised on high: it was not his
own! A slow, sonorous voice was proclaiming aloud that victory had been
adjudged to Stephen Kiesslinger, born in the burgh of Antwerp, son of a
wharfinger in that town.

When Nello recovered his consciousness he was lying on the stones without,
and Patrasche was trying with every art he knew to call him back to life. In
the distance a throng of the youths of Antwerp were shouting around their
successful comrade, and escorting him with acclamations to his home upon the
quay.

The boy staggered to his feet and drew the dog into his embrace. “It is all
over, dear Patrasche,” he murmured—“all over!”

He rallied himself as best he could, for he was weak from fasting, and
retraced his steps to the village. Patrasche paced by his side with his head
drooping and his old limbs feeble from hunger and sorrow.

The snow was falling fast: a keen hurricane blew
page: 52 from the north: it was bitter as death on the
plains. It took them long to traverse the familiar path, and the bells were
sounding four of the clock as they approached the hamlet. Suddenly Patrasche
paused, arrested by a scent in the snow, scratched, whined, and drew out
with his teeth a small case of brown leather. He held it up to Nello in the
darkness. Where they were there stood a little Calvary, and a lamp burned
dully under the cross: the boy mechanically turned the case to the light: on
it was the name of Baas Cogez, and within it were notes for six thousand
francs.

The sight roused the lad a little from his stupor. He thrust it in his shirt,
and stroked Patrasche and drew him onward. The dog looked up wistfully in
his face.

Nello made straight for the mill‐house, and went to the house‐door and struck
on its panels. The miller’s wife opened it weeping, with little Alois
clinging close to her skirts.

“Is it thee, thou poor lad?” she said kindly through her tears. “Get thee
gone ere the Baas see thee. We are in sore trouble to‐night. He is out
seeking for a power of money that he has let fall riding homeward, and in
this snow he never will find it; and God knows it will go nigh to ruin us.
It
page: 53 is Heaven’s own judgment for the
things we have done to thee.”

Nello put the note‐case in her hand and signed Patrasche within the
house.

“Patrasche found the money to‐night,” he said quickly. “Tell Baas Cogez so: I
think he will not deny the dog shelter and food in his old age. Keep him
from pursuing me, and I pray of you to be good to him.”

Ere either woman or dog knew what he meant he had stooped and kissed
Patrasche: then closed the door hurriedly on him, and disappeared in the
gloom of the fast‐falling night.

The woman and the child stood speechless with joy and fear: Patrasche vainly
spent the fury of his anguish against the iron‐bound oak of the barred
house‐door. They did not dare unbar the door and let him forth: they tried
all they could to solace him. They brought him sweet cakes and juicy meats;
they tempted him with the best they had; they tried to lure him to abide by
the warmth of the hearth; but it was of no avail. Patrasche refused to be
comforted or to stir from the barred portal.

It was six o’clock when, from an opposite entrance, the miller at last came,
jaded and broken, into his wife’s presence. “It is lost for ever,” he said,
with
page: 54 an ashen cheek and a quiver in his
stern voice. “We have looked with lanterns everywhere: it is gone—the little
maiden’s portion and all!”

His wife put the money into his hold, and told him how it had come back to
her. The strong man sank trembling into a seat and covered his face, ashamed
and almost afraid.

“I have been cruel to the lad,” he muttered at length: “I deserved not to
have good at his hands.”

Little Alois, taking courage, crept close to her father and nestled against
him her fair curly head.

“Nello may come here again, father?” she whispered. “He may come to‐morrow as
he used to do?”

The miller pressed her in his arms: his hard, sun‐burned face was very pale
and his mouth trembled. “Surely, surely,” he answered his child. “He shall
bide here on Christmas Day, and any other day he will. In my greed I sinned,
and the Lord chastened me gently: God helping me, I will make amends to the
boy—I will make amends.”

Little Alois kissed him in gratitude and joy, then slid from his knees and
ran to where the dog kept watch by the door.

“And to‐night I may feast Patrasche?” she cried in a child’s thoughtless
glee.

Her father bent his head gravely: “Ay, ay: let the
page: 55 dog have the best;” for the stern old man was
moved and shaken to his heart’s depths.

It was Christmas Eve, and the mill‐house was filled with oak‐logs and squares
of turf, with cream and honey, with meat and bread, and the rafters were
hung with wreaths of evergreen, and the Calvary and the cuckoo‐clock looked
out from a red mass of holly. There were little paper‐lanterns, too, for
Alois, and toys of various fashions and sweetmeats in bright‐pictured
papers. There were light and warmth and abundance everywhere, and the child
would fain have made the dog a guest honored and feasted.

But Patrasche would neither lie in the warmth nor share in the cheer.
Famished he was and very cold, but without Nello he would partake neither of
comfort nor food. Against all temptation he was proof, and close against the
door he leaned always, watching only for a means of escape.

“He wants the lad,” said Baas Cogez. “Good dog! good dog! I will go over to
the lad the first thing at day‐dawn.”

For no one but Patrasche knew that Nello had left the hut, and no one but
Patrasche divined that Nello had left him there, to to face starvation and
misery alone.

The mill‐kitchen was very warm: great logs crackled
page: 56 and flamed on the hearth; neighbours came in for
a glass of wine and a slice of the fat goose baking for supper. Alois,
gleeful and sure of her playmate back on the morrow, bounded and sang, and
tossed back her yellow hair. Baas Cogez, in the fulness of his heart, smiled
on her through moistened eyes, and spoke of the way in which he would
befriend her favourite companion; the house‐ mother sat with calm contented
face at the spinning‐wheel; the cuckoo in the clock chirped mirthful hours.
Amidst it all Patrasche was bidden with a thousand words of welcome to tarry
there a cherished guest, and he would not. Neither peace nor plenty could
allure him where Nello was not.

When the supper smoked on the board, and the voices were loudest and
gladdest, and the Christ‐child brought choicest gifts to Alois, Patrasche,
watching always an occasion, glided out when the door was unlatched by a
careless new‐comer, and as swiftly as his weak and tired limbs would bear
him sped over the snow in the bitter, black night. He had only one
thought—to follow Nello. A human friend might have paused for the pleasant
meal, the cheery warmth, the cosy slumber; but that was not the friendship
of Patrasche. He remembered a bygone time, when an old man and a little
child had found him sick unto death in the wayside ditch.

page: 57

Snow had fallen freshly all the evening long; it was now nearly ten; the
trail of the boy’s footsteps was almost obliterated. It took Patrasche long
and arduous labour to discover any scent by which to guide him in pursuit.
When at last he found it, it was lost again quickly; and lost and recovered,
and again lost and again recovered, a hundred times, and more.

The night was very wild. The lamps under the wayside crosses were blown out:
the roads were sheets of ice; the impenetrable darkness hid every trace of
habitations; there was no living thing abroad. All the cattle were housed,
and in all the huts and homesteads men and women rejoiced and feasted. There
was only Patrasche out in the cruel cold—old and famished and full of pain,
but with the strength and the patience of a great love to sustain him in his
search.

The trail of Nello’s steps, faint and obscure as it was under the new snow,
went straightly along the accustomed tracks into Antwerp. It was past
midnight when Patrasche traced it over the boundaries of the town and into
the narrow, tortuous, gloomy streets. It was all quite dark in the town. Now
and then some light gleamed ruddily through the crevices of house‐shutters,
or some group went homeward with lanterns chanting drinking‐songs. The
streets were all white
page: 58 with ice: the high
walls and roofs loomed black against them. There was scarce a sound save the
riot of the winds down the passages as they tossed the creaking signs and
shook the tall lamp‐irons.

So many passers‐by had trodden through and through the snow, so many divers
paths had crossed and recrossed each other, that the dog had a hard task to
retain any hold on the track he followed. But he kept on his way, though the
cold pierced him to the bone, and the jagged ice cut his feet, and the
hunger in his body gnawed like a rat’s teeth. He kept on his way—a poor
gaunt, shivering, drooping thing, that no one pitied as he went—and by long
patience traced the steps he loved into the very heart of the burgh and up
to the steps of the great cathedral.

“He is gone to the things that he loved,” thought Patrasche: he could not
understand, but he was full of sorrow and of pity for the art‐passion that
to him was so incomprehensible and yet so sacred.

The portals of the cathedral were unclosed after the midnight mass. Some
heedlessness in the custodians, too eager to go home and feast or sleep, or
too drowsy to know whether they turned the keys aright, had left one of the
doors unlocked. By that accident the foot‐falls Patrasche sought had passed
through into the
page: 59 building, leaving the
white marks of snow upon the dark stone floor. By that slender white thread,
frozen as it fell, he was guided through the intense silence, through the
immensity of the vaulted space—guided straight to the gates of the chancel,
and, stretched there upon the stones, he found Nello. He crept up
noiselessly, and touched the face of the boy. “Didst thou dream that I
should be faithless and forsake thee? I—a dog?” said that mute caress.

The lad raised himself with a low cry and clasped him close.

“Let us lie down and die together,” he murmured. “Men have no need of us, and
we are all alone.”

In answer, Patrasche crept closer yet, and laid his head upon the young boy’s
breast. The great tears stood in his brown, sad eyes: not for himself—for
himself he was happy.

They lay close together in the piercing cold. The blasts that blew over the
Flemish dykes from the northern seas were like waves of ice, which froze
every living thing they touched. The interior of the immense vault of stone
in which they were was even more bitterly chill than the snow‐covered plains
without. Now and then a bat moved in the shadows—now and then a gleam of
light came on the ranks of carven figures. Under the Rubens they lay
together, quite
page: 60 still, and soothed almost
into a dreaming slumber by the numbing narcotic of the cold. Together they
dreamed of the old glad days when they had chased each other through the
flowering grasses of the summer meadows, or sat hidden in the tall bulrushes
by the water’s side, watching the boats go seaward in the sun.

No anger had ever separated them; no cloud had ever come between them; no
roughness on the one side, no faithlessness on the other, had ever obscured
their perfect love and trust. All through their short lives they had done
their duty as it had come to them, and had been happy in the mere sense of
living, and had begrudged nothing to any man or beast, and had been quite
content because quite innocent. And in the faintness of famine and of the
frozen blood that stole dully and slowly through their veins, it was of the
days they had spent together that they dreamed, lying there in the long
watches of the night of Noël.

Suddenly through the darkness a great white radiance streamed through the
vastness of the aisles; the moon, that was at her height, had broken through
the clouds; the snow had ceased to fall; the light reflected from the snow
without was clear as the light of dawn. It fell through the arches full upon
the two pictures above, from which the boy on his entrance had flung
page: 61 back the veil: the Elevation and the
Descent of the Cross were for one instant visible.

Nello rose to his feet and stretched his arms to them: the tears of a
passionate ecstasy glistened on the paleness of his face.

“I have seen them at last!” he cried aloud. “O God, it is enough!”

His limbs failed under him, and he sank upon his knees, still gazing upward
at the majesty that he adored. For a few brief moments the light illumined
the divine visions that had been denied to him so long—light, clear and
sweet and strong as though it streamed from the throne of Heaven.

Then suddenly it passed away: once more a great darkness covered the face of
Christ.

The arms of the boy drew close again the body of the dog.

“We shall see His face—there,” he murmured; “and He will not
part us, I think; He will have mercy.”

page: 62

IV.

ON the morrow, by the chancel of the cathedral, the people of
Antwerp found them both. They were both dead: the cold of the night had
frozen into stillness alike the young life and the old. When the Christmas
morning broke and the priests came to the temple, they saw them lying thus
on the stones together. Above the veils were drawn back from the great
visions of Rubens, and the fresh rays of the sunrise touched the
thorn‐crowned head of the Christ.

As the day grew on there came an old, hard‐featured man, who wept as women
weep.

“I was cruel to the lad,” he muttered, “and now I would have made amends—yea,
to the half of my substance—and he should have been to me as a son.”

There came also, as the day grew apace, a painter who had fame in the world,
and who was liberal of hand and of spirit.

“I seek one who should have had the prize yesterday had worth won,” he said
to the people,—“A boy of rare promise and genius. An old wood‐cutter on a
fallen tree at eventide—that was all his theme.
page: 63 But there was greatness for the future in it. I
would fain find him, and take him with me and teach him art.”

And a little child with curling fair hair, sobbing bitterly as she clung to
her father’s arm, cried aloud, “Oh, Nello, come! We have all ready for thee.
The Christ‐child’s hands are full of gifts, and the old piper will play for
us; and the mother says thou shalt stay by the earth and burn nuts with us
all the Noël week long—yes, even to the Feast of the Kings! And Patrasche
will be so happy! Oh, Nello, wake and come!”

But the young pale face, turned upward to the light of the great Rubens with
a smile upon its mouth, answered them all, “It is too late.”

For the sweet, sonorous bells went ringing through the frost, and the
sunlight shone upon the plains of snow, and the populace trooped gay and
glad through the streets, but Nello and Patrasche no more asked charity at
their hands. All they needed now Antwerp gave unbidden.

Death had been more pitiful to them than longer life would have been. It had
taken the one in the loyalty of love, and the other in the innocence of
faith, from a world which for love has no recompense, and for faith no
fulfilment.

All their lives they had been together, and in their
page: 64 deaths they were not divided: for when they were
found the arms of the boy were folded too closely around the dog to be
severed without violence, and the people of their little village, contrite
and ashamed, implored a special grace for them, and, making them one grave,
laid them to rest there side by side—for ever.